


Scar Tissue

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, F/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 12:40:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20835623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: Mulder (being a trained psychologist) starts noticing signs of PTSD in Scully after the events of FTF/Tithonus but doesn't know how to approach her because of their tense relationship since Diana's arrival.





	1. Chapter 1

She jumps at the sound. Slams her hand on the desk, upends the tray of folders and they crash to the floor. She’s on her knees in seconds, shoving papers back into the files and he squats beside her, so close she can see the nicks on his neck where he’s shaved too carelessly. The smell of cologne is almost overpowering. He’s changed it, she thinks. It’s sharper to her senses. Like everything recently. Sights, sounds, smells, touch. His hand over her shoulder is hot, cutting. She rolls her muscles forward, trying to loosen his grip but he doesn’t budge.

“All right?” he asks. His empathetic voice. The one he reserves for victims.

“Sorry,” she says, picking up the folders and stepping back. Out of his space. If she can’t remove herself entirely from his thrall, she can at least put a distance between them in the office. They’re not even officially on the X-Files anymore but she hasn’t been able to extract herself for more than a day or two at a time.

“Let me, Scully.” And he’s wrangling the files from her, piling them up on the desk, sifting the papers in and out. Sorting it out for her. He doesn’t say a word but there’s a lingering sense of her clumsiness, of her dysfunction, just in the way he taps the files on the desktop straighten them up and slots them into the tray. He realigns his nameplate, smiles at her, but his head is tilted, his eyes questioning.

“Thank you,” she says and it seems so hard to get the words out straight.

“I’ll drive you to your appointment if you want,” he says, lounging back in his chair. He seems more relaxed and she sinks into the chair opposite, pulls down the hem of her skirt, crosses her ankles.

“What appointment?” she asks, without thinking, because, truly, she has no clue what he’s talking about.

He slots a pencil behind his ear, leans forward, palms flat to the desk. “With the doctor. Your wound care…”

The instant he says it, hot flashes rush up her chest and cheeks. She rubs at her skin, as if that will cool it down. With her eyes shut, she should feel safer but all she sees is white – snow and ice and terror; cold, clinical fear. He’s even closer to her when she opens them again, and it’s written all over his face. His worry for her, his concern. But it’s fake, all show. Out there, waiting for him in an office or a bar, or even his apartment, is Diana. Scully knows whatever weakness she shows will be turned against her. It’s clear, so clear now, where his loyalties lie. She’s been so stupid. Her opinions have simply been noted and filed away. Perhaps even picked apart and laughed at over dinner and scotch.

“I rescheduled,” she says to him and pushes herself up, willing her legs to hold her without trembling. Her gut aches. And it’s not the pain from the gunshot. Tissue and nerve and muscle can heal. But what about faith? What about partnership?

The blanket is weighted on her, pressing her to the bed. She tries to kick it off but it’s pinning her down. The sensation of it against her skin is like a gel, congealing, squelching as she thrashes. It thickens and coagulates, creeping up her throat and invading her mouth, her nasal passages, her ears. Her head is swelling with it, the pressure building and building.

She jerks awake, choking and coughing. Cold sweat trickling down her face. She tugs at her ears, touches her face with the pads of her fingers to make sure her skin is dry, taut over her skull. That she hasn’t dissolved into some edematous mass. By the time she arrives at the office, fleshed out again, she catches Mulder watching her. There’s a scent of Agent Fowley’s perfume washing over the room.

“Anything to report?” she asks.

“You look tired,” he says, walking from the filing cabinet. “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

“Why would you say that?”

He waits to respond, allowing her heartbeat to ramp up. If he doesn’t speak soon, she imagines her own blood spurting out of her ears, splattering the surfaces, running off the desk and chairs. She would bleed out in minutes. After Ritter shot her, she felt it pulsing, spilling. She clutched at her abdomen uselessly. She had no strength, no capacity to pull the edges of the wound together, to stitch herself shut. Yet her mind knew what was happening. She recited each aspect of the injury, the resultant trauma, the prognosis as she sat there, dying.

His hands cover hers and she looks down at her stomach. She’s tilted forward, his forearm against her hip and he’s saying something but she can’t quite make it out. All she can see is blood pooling on the floor and she can’t get any air past her larynx to form words.

“Scully? Sit down. Please, here.” He manoeuvres her to the seat.

It’s the door shutting that brings her back. Diana Fowley is in the room. “What’s wrong, Fox? Does she need an ambulance?”

“No,” Scully says, pushing his hand away. “I’m fine. Please. I’m fine, just let me…”

He hands her a glass of water. “You should get it checked out, Scully.”

“Get what checked out, Mulder?” Her voice is quick, cutting and Fowley’s eyebrows shoot up. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

He holds his hands up and she swears she sees rusty blood, feathered along the lines on his palms. She blinks. Once, twice, and slowly, his skin turns pink again.

He follows her to the parking lot. She doesn’t acknowledge him, just walks faster.

“Dammit, Scully. Wait.”

“For what? So that you and Agent Fowley can find me unfit for work? Accuse me of paranoia, of losing my mind? Is that it? Is that how this is going to play out?”

Arm crooked, his hand folds over his hipbone. She watches his fingers flex, tries to find some calm in the rhythm.

“What do you mean, this, Scully?” His face softens into a smile and he opens his palms to her, the classic conciliatory tactic. Hostage negotiation 101. “You’re sounding as paranoid as me.”

“Well,” she says, “congratulations on being such a compelling teacher. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She turns to open the car door and his hand covers her shoulder. “I’m worried about you, Dana.”

She stiffens at his use of her first name. He lets her go. She hears his sigh, the rustle of hands slotting into pockets, but she doesn’t turn around.


	2. Chapter 2

A wound’s proliferative phase can last up to four weeks. The wound bed is filled with granulation tissue and new blood vessels form. The edges contract and then epithelial cells grow from the margins, migrating until the wound is covered. When she started on the X Files, Scully was fresh, open but she sees how events have transpired to draw her edges together, closing her off from family, friends, real life.   
She runs her hand over the puckered skin on her abdomen, still taken aback at the pinkness of the scar. The final stage of wound healing can last for two years. She, better than anyone, understands its complexity. There’s new tissue growth, collagen restructure, and healing can be affected by numerous factors including age, nutrition, body type. She’s strong and fit but she’s also acutely aware of how much mental and physical trauma her body has been through.

Her surgeon had smiled at her when he signed her out of medical centre. “You know as well as I do, Dr Scully, that establishing the right healing environment is paramount to affording your body the time and space to replace the devitalized tissue. Our bodies can perform miracles given the right circumstances; although I have to say, that it is quite the miracle that you even survived.”

Mulder had said much the same. Made some joke about her faith, tugged at her cross, genuflected in front of her. And then probably spent the night with Diana.

—–

She needs groceries. She just doesn’t need the hassle of driving to the plaza, parking, pushing a trolley around and then unpacking. There’s a dragging sensation, not just in her abdomen, but in her chest, arms, legs. She feels unnecessarily heavy, bloated by something unnameable, and a sudden bite of tears cuts into her. The car keys clatter to the table as she slumps into a chair. Tears rush, burning her cheeks. Her nose fills and she can’t breathe. She can’t get a breath in. Her chest tightens. She’s back in that pod, trapped. She’s conscious, aware, but she can’t move. She can’t hear. She. Can’t. Breathe.  
The phone trills and she comes slowly back. It’s her mom. Scully doesn’t speak, just listens, nods as though her mom can see her. Becoming aware of her inhalations and exhalations is a small pleasure. She has no distinct memory of the call ending, but she’s still clutching the phone when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Mulder. The space between his raps is code for his mood. He’s worried and now she’s pulling together her edges, stitching herself back together.

“I’m coming,” she says, pushing the heel of her hand under her nose, straightening her hair, rubbing the sticky tear tracks from her cheeks.  
He’s standing there with two grocery bags in his arms and a broad smile plastered across his face. But his eyes drill into her, run her up and down. As he walks to the kitchen, he’s checking out her apartment. Looking for what? Evidence of her descent into madness. Hers would be neater than his. She’s seen him plunge. She’s brought him back, talked him down, tidied his room, washed his laundry.

“Thought I’d save you a trip to the supermarket. Spinach fettuccini was on special. And that pomodoro sauce you like.”  
“Mom called you,” she says, trying to stay the polite side of accusative.

He doesn’t answer, just unpacks the items, putting them in places they don’t belong. She rubs at the scar on her nape.  
“I don’t need you to mollycoddle me just to curry favour, Mulder.”

He’s holding a bunch of young carrots in his hand, their vivid green fronds splayed across the front of his pale grey tee-shirt. “Curry favour?”  
She doesn’t dignify his contemptuous tone with a response. Just rips the carrots from him, too quickly, so that the greenery comes away from the vegetables with a tear. He looks down. She swallows. The way he’s clutching at the fronds is pitiful. He actually feels sorry for her. It’s not the empathy he has for victims. It’s sympathy.

She has a sudden image of Fellig’s apartment, the blinding flash of his camera, the searing blaze of Ritter’s shot, the burning shock of the bullet entering her, ripping open her skin, her flesh; and then her hands slipping around in her own blood, patting at the flow. Her hands clutch at her abdomen reflexively.  
“Scully?”

“I’m fine, Mulder,” she says, pushing away his hands. The fronds stick to her sweater and she grabs at them. They scatter on the floor. He bends to pick them up, throws them in the trash, fills the jug.  
“I really think…”

“No,” she says.  
He doesn’t turn. “You don’t even know what I was…”

“I’m not making an appointment with anybody, Mulder. I said I was fine. I would think by now you would have learned to trust my medical judgement.”  
He actually has the balls to laugh. The sound of it, that heartiness, that fullness. She grips the edges of the table, slides slowly into a chair. He catches her wincing and she snuffs out a wry laugh from her nose. His face, his shoulders, straighten.

“The wound is healing as it should be. There will always be some concomitant pain with a gunshot to the abdomen.”  
There’s an edge of frustration to his sigh. He sits opposite. “I’m not talking about physical healing, Scully.” He walks his fingers over the table top but she slips her hands into her lap. His phone buzzes. He pulls it out but switches it off. The kettle hisses, leaving a patch of steam on the window in the shape of a cartoonish speech bubble.

“Are you staying for coffee?” she asks.  
He doesn’t.

——

In the decon shower he checks her out, but she’s more conscious of the scar than her complete nakedness. It’s the much bigger indicator of her vulnerability.  
When she thinks about him with Fowley, her gut burns. She thinks about how infection spreads, seeps from a wound, eating away at surrounding tissue, flesh, sometimes even bone. It’s a risk. Osteomyelitis. Necrosis. Gangrene. The loss of structure. The cutting away of something. A complete breakdown.

At home, it’s easy to sink into a chair with a bottle of merlot and flick through job ads in medical journals. It’s easy to think about the other life she could have had. Scully calls her mom. Maggie talks about Bill and Tara and the kids and she asks after Fox and tells her about her new book club and Scully understands she could never have had that other life. That her whole psyche, her very essence is tied up with the FBI, with the Files, with Mulder. And she feels her heart pump faster yet her blood slow and thicken around her stomach. She swallows the wine.

In the morning, her limbs are heavy but she doesn’t remember dreaming, she doesn’t remember waking at all. The shower stings and she relishes the sharp pain. It leaves her skin red and dry, itching. But that’s a good sign, she thinks.


	3. Chapter 3

There’s a knock at her door. It’s not Mulder but Diana Fowley, suited, holding a paper bag. A peace offering for lunch? 

“May I come in, Agent Scully?”

Scully watches her as she glances around the apartment, checking out her living and mental state, much as Mulder had done. Fowley opens the bag. Sweet warmth spills out. 

“I’ll get some plates.” Scully reaches up to the cupboard and the skin around her middle tightens. A small moan escapes her lips.

“Let me,” Fowley says, taking the plates from the shelf. “I know how hard it is to recover, Agent Scully.”

“I’m fine. I’ll make you a coffee. The jug’s just boiled.” The raspberry filling on the pastries is dark red, congealing. She presses the back of her fingers to her lips. Swallows down the bitter bile. The coffee mixed with the aroma of Fowley’s Chanel No. 5 is making her nauseous.

“You haven’t been in the office for a few days. Fox…Agent Mulder was concerned.” 

Fowley’s voice is distorted. This whole scene is distorted. Her head is throbbing, her tongue is thick and stuck to the roof of her mouth. “I needed…”

“Take all the time you need,” Fowley says, sipping her coffee. Her eyes never leave Scully’s face. They’re taking everything in. Trained observance. 

Scully feels almost violated. “What does that mean?” She lays her hands on the table but she must have moved faster than she thought because the pastries wobble, one slips off the plate scattering flakes across the surface. All the while, Fowley is watching her. Making mental notes. 

Is this what Mulder felt like in the early days? Scrutinised? Trapped? A twinge of sympathy, guilt, but then she snaps back to reality. This is his doing. He’s chasing her away by using her own demons against her. Not the ones he’s had them chasing for years. No. He’s using a figure from his past, someone she knows nothing about, but who has knowledge of him, to squeeze her out of the equation. Partner? The man wouldn’t know trust and sharing if it dressed up as an alien and abducted him. She sees it all so clearly now that it makes her want to laugh. One of those maniacal, chest-opening laughs. But then Fowley would really deem her mad.

“Why are you here? Why didn’t Mulder come? Does he even know you’re here?” She can feel her voice squeezing through her throat and out into the air, pitchy.

Fowley reaches across, covers Scully’s hand in her own. Her fingers are thin, long, cold. She’s wearing a heavy gold band on the ring finger of her right hand. It’s ugly. Masculine. Scully tries to pull her own hand back but Fowley grips it. “Dana. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. It just takes time.”

Scully wrenches her hand away, stands up, yells, “Get out of my house.” Her coffee and the plate fly through the air and fall onto the tiles with such a sharp crash that Scully gasps and clutches her ears. Her heart lurches, buffeting against her rib cage, painfully. The silence that follows is even louder than the breakage. She looks at the mess: pointed shards of white porcelain, greasy lumps of pastry, fruit smeared into the tiles, brown liquid blooming across the floor. Broken. Everything is broken. And she can’t move. She can’t feel her legs. She wants to scream but there’s no air left inside. 

“I’ll get a cloth,” Fowley says and starts clearing up, moving around with precision. Doing things. “Sit.” It’s a command and Scully obeys. It’s easier somehow, to just let someone else take control. She watches Fowley search for a dustpan, broom, cloths. She couldn’t even tell her where any of those things were, if she tried. 

She’s empty. 

When the mess has gone, Fowley sits back down. At some point she must have got a blanket because Scully has one wrapped around her shoulders and she’s shivering.

“How are you feeling now?”

“Is Mulder coming?”

Fowley half-smiles. “Do you want me to call him?” 

Scully shakes her head. He shouldn’t see her like this. She takes a juddering breath in. Clears her mind, resets. She thinks back to the events preceding, looks back at Diana and whispers, “Thank you.”

The woman shrugs, pulls her hair back and holds it at her nape. “When I was in Europe, we did some dangerous work. Undercover. There was one op that went horribly wrong. I was badly injured. I lost a partner. A good agent. I…felt like it was…my fault. I was the senior agent. I relived it every moment. The nights,” she says, letting her hair fall back around her shoulders and crossing her legs, “the small hours, I would lie there and pick over every detail. I had terrible nightmares, flashbacks, palpitations. It…it made me feel weak. Not just in a physical sense, but in an emotional way.”

Scully can’t look at her while she’s relaying this information. Diana’s words tear at her insides with their visceral honesty. Like Ritter’s bullet. 

“What did you do?” Scully asks.

“I did all the usual things, saw a counsellor, got drunk, took stupid risks, fucked around. I see how all those things numbed the pain for a while, but the pain always came back.” She dips her head, and Scully know she’s trying to get her to lift her own eyes. “It always comes back.”

“I’m not drinking too much. I’m exercising. I’m working.”

“And the nightmares, the flashbacks, the panic attacks? How are you dealing with those?”

Scully flinches. “Honestly, I’m…”

“Fine,” Diana says, but she doesn’t mean it as an extension to Scully’s sentence. It’s a statement. She’s giving up. She came here expecting Scully to be putty in her hands, to bend and mould into the shape that she and Mulder want her to be. Fowley’s face sets. She’s failed and she doesn’t like it. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Scully doesn’t see her out. She listens to Fowley’s footsteps clipping down the hallway. Confident strides. Leaving her. Fatigue fills her limbs like lead. Her temples tighten and tension pulls at her shoulders. She feels nauseous. Bile stings her throat. The apartment is suddenly cavernous, filled with ominous shadows, encroaching on her place in the kitchen. She stands but her legs are like jelly. She’s on the floor before she knows what’s happening. A leftover shard of china digging into her cheek. Tears mix with blood and run into the grout between the tiles. Leaking. Everything is leaching away from her.

It’s a long time before she rouses herself. Her joints are stiff, she’s cold, empty. She calls her mom. Listens to her gentle voice a while. Then she calls Mulder.

She’s still in her robe when he arrives, hair wet, skin stinging. Tears rush out, uncontrollable. He lets her weep. 

“The final stage of wound healing is maturation,” she says, after a while.

He nods.

“It can take two years. The dermal tissue is overhauled, remodelled. The tensile strength is enhanced. Non-functional fibroblasts are replaced with functional ones. It’s a long, complex process.”

“It’s going to okay, Scully. You’re going to be okay.”

“I made an appointment with a counsellor.”

“It’s not a sign of weakness.” She can see the relief in his eyes, but it’s more than that; there’s a deeper emotion at play. He reaches for her hand. God, she’s missed his touch. “It’s a sign of strength.”

“But even after healing, the wound site can remain 20 per cent weaker than the rest of the body.”

He shakes his head, chuffs. “Dana Scully operating at 20 per cent less capacity, is still 100 per cent better than most.”

His arms wrap around her, wet hair sticking to his face. “I’m sorry, Mulder, I’m so sorry.”

“No. No, Scully. I’m sorry. I let you down. I should have stepped in earlier.”

“I wouldn’t have listened. I didn’t listen.” He laughs, a genuine chuckle. She feels instantly lighter. Pulling away, she sees the question hanging. “It was Diana, actually. She made me see…”

“Funny…she told me you didn’t respond to her. She felt she’d wasted her time.”

“That’s not true.” She shakes her head.

Mulder tips her chin towards his face. “Perhaps you were just ready to face it, Scully.”

“It?”

He sighs, snapping from support to irritation. It hurts her, his instant change of attitude, but with her newfound clarity, she sees that her defensiveness has become a weapon, not a shield.

Her eyes fill again and she pats her fingers over her weary eyelids. “You’re right. I am. I am ready to face it, this. The rest of the process. Whatever it takes. And Diana, she really did make me think about moving forward.” 

“You’re the only one who could have made that decision, Scully.” His face softens again and there’s a warm energy running through her veins, positively charged. Something she hasn’t experienced in a while. 

“Thank you for coming, Mulder.” 

“Any time, partner.”

Her hands rest on her abdomen. The scar there is healing. She has to believe that. New cells regenerating, rebuilding, restoring. Her body is doing what it does best. And when Mulder leaves, she runs her hand over the striations and lets sleep take her down.


End file.
